The Neighbor’s House is Haunted

It was the sort of dream that wasn’t any sort of way in any particular direction. Soft, out of focus scenes played one after the other, no rhyme, no reason, nothing too scary, nothing too pleasant. The sort of dreams you forget about before you’ve even woken up.

Dave still didn’t appreciate being torn from them. The fact it was nothing short of a piercing, jagged scream through the window that woke him up was chocolate icing on the crap cake. He looked over at the clock on the nightstand.

Four hours until my alarm goes off. Shit.

“Noooooooooooo…..”

Another scream.

Next to him, Crystal rolled over.

“Wuzzat?” she muttered, rubbing her forehead.

Dave sighed. “Neighbors.”

“Not again.”

The house next door had been haunted for as long as they had lived on Oak Street. Longer, actually. The first time their realtor had brought them to this house she had paused on its brick walkway to the front door and eyed the neighboring house suspiciously.

“Be glad I’m showing you this house, and not that one. Not that I would ever sell that house to anyone, no, that’s all Marlene.”

“Structural damage?” Crystal had asked. Like all the houses on Oak Street, the two were nearly identical save for little differences. Paint on the shutters, cornices, that sort of thing.

“No,” their realtor had said, lowering her voice. “Haunted.”

“Haunted?” Dave had said with a snort.

“I know, I know. ‘What the F,’ right? Except it is. Goes through tenants faster than a cheap apartment above a meth lab. And the thing is, we don’t even know why. Marlene doesn’t care. There’s no recorded murder in the building so she never has to disclose something is wrong. Just keeps selling it every couple of years. Terrible bitch, that one.”

“Haunted?” was all Dave could think to say again.

And the realtor had simply shrugged. “Why do you think all the houses on this block are so much cheaper than the rest of the area?”

Dave had wondered, actually. Similar houses a block away were going for hundreds of thousands more than this one. He figured there was a high-tension power line, or a smell, or bad neighbors. Certainly nothing he couldn’t ignore in this economy.

Haunted neighbors, though. That had been a new one.

Of course they had bought the house. And of course they had been skeptical about the haunting. Until the screaming started.

Anyway, that had been eight years ago. The house next door had gone through five families. This was the sixth. They had only moved in a couple months ago.

“Seems early for them to be this loud,” Crystal muttered, her eyes still closed.

“I know,” Dave said. He’d sat up against the headboard. Once he had been woken up at night, he was awake. It took him hours to get back to sleep, if he ever did. It worked out pretty well when the kids were babies. If they woke up in the middle of the night, so did he, and he’d take care of them until dawn when he could tag in Crystal and he could pass out on the couch for a few hours before work. But the kids were six and three, now, and mercifully on the other side of the house. They only ever woke when things got really bad. Usually the last night before whatever family was over there finally decided to throw in the towel.

More screams from next door woke him up, followed by huge booms that rumbled through the ground. He’d been dozing. Damn it, maybe he would have been able to fall back asleep. Now that was ruined.

Now Crystal was sitting up, too, staring at the window. She sleepily rubbed an eye as she yawned.

“Jeez, Dave, this one sounds bad,” she said. “Maybe you should go over there?”

“What the hell am I going to do?” he asked.

“I don’t know! Make sure they’re all right.”

He bit his tongue, because the only thing he could say was the same thing. He was a regional sales manager for a company that made at-home hard water testing kits. The only things he knew about hauntings were the stuff he saw on television, and he doubted very much whatever was terrorizing the Thompsons was the Babadook. And even if it was, he couldn’t remember how they had gotten rid of him in the movie. Wait, had they?

“They knew what they were getting into,” Dave said.

Crystal only stared at him in the dark. “If you won’t go, I will.”

He half sighed, half growled. He didn’t want that either. He didn’t want any of them going anywhere near that house when it was quiet, let alone when the screaming rave was going on.

“Fine, fine! But if I die I’m haunting you.”

“Don’t go in. Just knock on the door. Maybe the entity still thinks we don’t know about it.”

The Thompsons really did know what they were getting into. Dave, Lilah Burke on the other side of the haunted house, and Ray Nevins across the street had gotten together at a barbecue five years back and decided enough was enough. That had been immediately after the Patels had been driven from the house in under six months, a new record. If this realtor Marlene wasn’t going to tell potential buyers about the dangers just to make a quick buck, then it was up to them.

There was a fence between the two houses in the back, and Dave had made sure to be tending to the flowers and bushes every time he noticed Marlene pull up in her Escalade with new potential buyers. Lilah always posted up on her deck with a book, and Ray would start cleaning their car. Cleanest Jeep in the entire tri-county area.

“Hi!” Dave would say, friendlier than Mr. Rogers, drawing them closer to him and further away from the house and Marlene. “You looking to buy this place?”

And they would answer in the affirmative and start ask questions about the neighborhood. Dave would usually interrupt them.

“Don’t buy this place, it is haunted.”

And their smiles would falter. And they would inevitably asked, “…what?”

“It’s haunted. Very haunted. No one died here so Marlene doesn’t have to say anything, and she won’t if you ask, but it is very, very haunted, so don’t buy it, okay? You don’t have to believe me, just look at the sell history on Zillow.”

It was shocking how well this worked. Dave never got to talk to them after they walked away from him with the sort of eyes you give a man muttering to himself on the train, but he was willing to bet real money that they did look at the sell history on Zillow, saw that people were moving in and out every one to two years, and decided that even if it wasn’t ghosts, something was making people leave and they didn’t want any part of it.

And then eventually someone just simply couldn’t pass up the dirt cheap price. Dave understood. The economy, you know. This time it was the Thompsons. They had five kids. They probably would have moved directly into hell if it was rent controlled.

Dave stumbled down the stairs in the dark, trying to not wake up the kids. He got his boots on and pulled a coat over his t-shirt. He was only mildly surprised when he got to the sidewalk and saw Lilah and Ray already standing in front of the house, staring up at it.

“The partners send you out, too?” he asked.

The two of them nodded.

“How long ago did they move in again?” Ray asked.

“Three months,” Lilah said. “Way too soon for whatever is in there to be this loud already.”

As if on cue, something akin to a roar melted though the house’s boards.

“I bet one of those kids is a medium,” Ray said.

“A medium?”

“You know, a psychic or something. Latent powers or whatnot.”

“Oh,” Dave said, nodding. “And whatever’s in there latched onto the kid. Like, it’s feeding off them or something.”

Lilah looked at them like they were both insane. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

“I saw it in a movie,” Dave and Ray said at the same time.

“Well, whatever is going on, Val sent me out here because she thinks if I knock the thing in there will cut it out.”

“Crystal, too.”

Ray sighed. “Guess we should try that then, huh? Hopefully that works, because I will be out of ideas after that.”

None of them were psychic themselves, of course. If it wasn’t for moving in next door to a hellmouth, none of them would have believed in psychics, either. But here they were, and here was the house, and as they got closer up the walk they could feel the poison in the air. Too cold, too hot, too sour, too salty, and always pushing them, pushing them to go away. Where? Didn’t matter. As long as it was away.

“I think it knows we’re coming,” Ray muttered.

“Don’t put the coffee on,” Lilah said, panting. “We’re not staying.”

Dave was a little ahead of both of them. He didn’t know how it happened, but it had, and now he was the first at the top of the porch steps. And the first to the door. He was reaching for the doorbell, even though he didn’t want to. Even though every cell in his body was telling him to stop. To turn back. To go home. To leave the house to do whatever it was going to do.

But that was clearly the house talking. And he really couldn’t fault the Thompsons for not believing in ghosts out of nowhere.

A roar from inside.

The door pushed out against its hinges. Reaching for him.

Dave screamed. Maybe it was a word. Probably it wasn’t.

His finger found the cheap plastic button next to the door and pushed hard enough to make it crack.

The sounds stopped.

The force pushing them away stopped.

The lights behind the door sprung to life.

Seconds later, the door opened. Richard Thompson stood there, panting heavily, bleeding from above his eye. He put on a brave smile and waved.

“Evening, neighbors. What brings you to-”

Evie Thompson shoved Richard to the side and started pushing her kids out the door.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Rich, get out of the God damned house.”

“Evie-”

She didn’t even let him say anything else, just shoved him out the door behind the smallest child, who whimpered one last time as he passed.

“I told you something was wrong with this house!” he said before scurrying after his siblings.

“I knew it,” Dave and Ray said at the same time.

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